THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

Category Literature & Fiction
Format Paperback
Imprint Rupa
Price 195

ISBN: 978-93-5520-463-9
Pages: 216 pages
Date: 5th August 2022

ABOUT THIS BOOK

‘I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel […] the fear and empire of man had passed away.’
A sign of life on the distant planet of Mars; an eerie alien invasion threatening the future of humanity; a heart-wrenching battle between mankind and extraterrestrial forces; the trauma of a bloody war on innocents; a society plagued by anarchy; and the violent human instinct to destruct and kill in order to survive. One of the pioneering and bestselling novels in the genre of science fiction, H.G. Wells’s The War of the World is a thought-provoking and self-reflexive masterpiece exploring human greed, humanity’s urge to survive, the destructive chaos of society without artificial hierarchies as well as the fragility of what we refer to as human order and power. Detailing a spine-chilling war between the Martians and Earthlings, The War of the World combines the forces of technology, astronomy, history, politics, sociology and psychology to make readers contemplate upon the good-bad-and-ugly complexity of human existence, and the cataclysmic effects of what ensues when human civilization loses power to unknown forces beyond understanding or control.

AUTHOR OF THE BOOK

Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was a prolific English novelist, historian and journalist of the twentieth century. He is best known as the ‘father of science fiction’, having authored genre-defining works, such as The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) and The First Men in the Moon (1901), among others. Wells’s science fiction foresaw several modern technologies, including space travel, nuclear weapons and the internet. In a testament to the diversity of his writing, Wells authored several comic novels and short stories, mostly centred on the lives of the English lower middle class, notably, Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), Tono-Bungay (1909) and The History of Mr. Polly (1910). A true public intellectual, Wells also wrote several non-fiction works and journalistic pieces on sociopolitical issues of the Edwardian times.